Thursday, April 10, 2014

Odd Jobs

Some of the things we spend time on our pretty obvious like anything to do with hands on horse care. It is also no surprise that we spend a lot of time on farm maintenance as well. Pastures need to be mowed, re-seeded and fertilized, fences need repairs, etc. Other things might not be quite as obvious.

I spent a couple of hours last week breaking down cardboard boxes and hauling them off. We get a TON of boxes. Between monthly SmartPaks, routine supplies that we order, replacement items sent to us by our clients (such as blankets) and so on we get a staggering number of boxes in a month. I tend to let them pile up in the wash rack until it is unrecognizable as a wash rack and is literally overflowing with boxes. Every couple of months I lose a couple of hours of my life breaking down boxes and loading them in the truck.

Yesterday Jason and I spent an hour loading baling twine into the stock trailer to haul it off. Our stock trailer is big and we had it stuffed full of baling twine. We had to drive over the scales at the transfer station going in and then going back out. Anyone care to guess how many pounds of baling twine we hauled off?

Any guesses?

Did you guess 50 pounds?

Maybe 100 pounds?

The answer is . . .

drumroll please . . .

250 pounds of baling twine. No that isn't five years of baling twine that we had collected, this was only from the last few months. Who knew? In addition to exciting things like breaking down dozens of boxes and hauling off baling twine, in the last couple of days Jason has spread fertilizer on the pastures and I've been getting all of my notes and instructions organized for spring vaccinations. These seem like more "normal" activities to me.

What crazy things (horse/farm related or not) have you spent time on lately?

Jason spreading fertilizer

One of our many stashes of baling twine around the farm. We used pitchforks to load it all into the trailer!

It hasn't been 100% work with no fun around here. Jason transplanted a couple of redbuds. I don't think he appreciates it that I call them his "sticks." Here he is posing with one of his sticks.

3 comments:

We have a local twine dealer who takes in used twine and recycles it...Right now my big project is the trail obstacle course. After the clinic in three weeks, I'll get back to farming (and finishing the walls on the new shop.)

It makes sense that any task at the scale you are doing it will take significant time. You're right that as a single horse owner, I wouldn't have really thought about it from your perspective!

Lately, my time has been eaten up with keeping on top of scurfy leg fungus issues with the spring mud making an appearance. Poor horse had a good case of mud fever in the fall and now again with something similar but not quite the same. White hind, of course.

And I'm on top of monitoring for it! Still, it goes from clean to persistent problem in the 2 days I happen to not be out myself. Ugh.

Oh, and shedding. Endless grooming. Mane taming. Tail re-beautifying (though I must admit Mani always has a stunning tail, the mud is a challenge).

Next up - clipper training for real. I've been a little remiss in this dept...blog post on this to follow!